And LR/ACR have a very good range of sharpening tools these days, it's very mature s/w. With the a7r, probably a7 also, sharpening is really easy to dial in using ACR. Not so much in IDC, but I thought others might like to see a different opinion.

Some are liking C1 also, it now supports the a7 series. I am a happy ACR guy also, and I find the colours very good in the native profile, once WB is just right for what you want.

I hope you are right, douglas, re cooking diffraction handling into RAW images.

'Your main problem will be that the weight saving on the A7R body (from a D800) is quickly eaten up by the need to have very high quality, relative large lenses (of any make) to get anything like the best quality results from the sensor.' [my parentheses for context]

A quote from a DPR thread and a common message on forums. I mention this for information because there are so many great midrange zooms that are both medium weight and medium size, and have great performance for what this guy wanted it for - landscape work.

The Leica 35-70 f4 and Contax 35-70 f3.4 are both very well suited to the a7(r) and weigh 505 grams and 475 grams respectively. So for a total payload of around 1100 grams (475g + 475g + 110g adapter) you get as good or better than almost any combination that is double the weight.

I almost dismissed my CY 35-70 for the a7r but gave it a go anyway - wow, what a surprise - it handles great and is very special indeed IQ wise. For example, at 50mm and f8 all MTF lines are high and almost dead flat, no CA to speak of anywhere, 0.5% distortion. These and similar lenses are great cheaper alternatives to the 24-70/4 Zeiss due Jan 2014, which may disappoint.

I have seen differences from Sony's IDC and LR. Images processed in IDC can look very posterized on smooth transitions. I can't see that in LR using Adobe's standard profile.
My files also look sharper in IDC but it could be the level of sharpness applied by the different converters. Another possibility is that DRO, "Diffraction reduction" and "Detail reproduction technology" are present on RAW files converted with IDC only.

Fred Miranda wrote:
I have seen differences from Sony's IDC and LR. Images processed in IDC can look very posterized on smooth transitions. I can't see that in LR using Adobe's standard profile.
My files also look sharper in IDC but it could be the level of sharpness applied by the different converters. Another possibility is that DRO, "Diffraction reduction" and "Detail reproduction technology" are present on RAW files converted with IDC only.

I just had a look and found that the smallest RAW I've produced is 36,667,392 bytes and my largest is 37,617,664. Since the raw pixel data is 36,152,320 bytes this means the additional data has been between about 0.5 and 1.5 megabytes. This is certainly way more than would be required even for copious metadata (for scale: War & Peace in plain text is about 3MB ), so there is something more interesting than shooting parameters being stored there. The variation also seems detail-dependent as my smallest RAWs were from expodisc testing for magenta rings with the FE35 and the next smallest after those was an image that was 90% bokeh while the largest was a frame almost entirely of in-focus foliage.

My initial suspicion on this additional data was that these are embedded thumbnails for quicker display in the camera. I've found that magnifying in image review is comically slow while simply flipping through images scaled to the screen is not, which would match the thumbnail theory. It could also be that this additional data is for the various image enhancements but I'm still skeptical of this possibility due to the small size of the additional data. It's certainly not impossible, but I can't imagine what useful side-data the BIONZ X could be producing that stores in less than half a bit per pixel. I could have missed it, but I also can't find a setting to toggle the detail/diffraction features nor any mention of them in the manual which leads me to believe that these are always-on features. Of course even if these are always-on it could still be the case that they simply don't apply to RAW.

Apologies if this topic has been covered here but both FM search and Google search have failed to raise it. If it has been done would some kind soul please post a link?

I am intrigued by the FE 55/1.8 but assume that it will suffer from focus shift, as do all fast lenses. Clearly, if focusing manually, this will not be an issue since, with LV / EVF Setting Effect set to On, you will focus at the set aperture. However, when using AF, does focusing take place at the widest aperture or at the actual aperture with the Setting Effect On in the EVF? If it is the former I imagine there will be a focus shift as the lens stops down when the shutter is actuated.

akuba wrote:
I just had a look and found that the smallest RAW I've produced is 36,667,392 bytes and my largest is 37,617,664. Since the raw pixel data is 36,152,320 bytes this means the additional data has been between about 0.5 and 1.5 megabytes. This is certainly way more than would be required even for copious metadata (for scale: War & Peace in plain text is about 3MB ), so there is something more interesting than shooting parameters being stored there. The variation also seems detail-dependent as my smallest RAWs were from expodisc testing for magenta rings with the FE35 and the next smallest after those was an image that was 90% bokeh while the largest was a frame almost entirely of in-focus foliage.

My initial suspicion on this additional data was that these are embedded thumbnails for quicker display in the camera. I've found that magnifying in image review is comically slow while simply flipping through images scaled to the screen is not, which would match the thumbnail theory. It could also be that this additional data is for the various image enhancements but I'm still skeptical of this possibility due to the small size of the additional data. It's certainly not impossible, but I can't imagine what useful side-data the BIONZ X could be producing that stores in less than half a bit per pixel. I could have missed it, but I also can't find a setting to toggle the detail/diffraction features nor any mention of them in the manual which leads me to believe that these are always-on features. Of course even if these are always-on it could still be the case that they simply don't apply to RAW....Show more →

FYI, you can see the size of the preview image (and the smaller thumbnail) via exiftool. For example, to dump this information for all Sony raws in a given directory tree:

This above command will recursively find all .ARW files starting in c:\pics\my_sony_images and print only the preview+thumbnail image size from each file...the output for all files is redirected into a file named info.txt. Here is a sample output:

waterden wrote:
Apologies if this topic has been covered here but both FM search and Google search have failed to raise it. If it has been done would some kind soul please post a link?

I am intrigued by the FE 55/1.8 but assume that it will suffer from focus shift, as do all fast lenses. Clearly, if focusing manually, this will not be an issue since, with LV / EVF Setting Effect set to On, you will focus at the set aperture. However, when using AF, does focusing take place at the widest aperture or at the actual aperture with the Setting Effect On in the EVF? If it is the former I imagine there will be a focus shift as the lens stops down when the shutter is actuated....Show more →

waterden wrote:
Apologies if this topic has been covered here but both FM search and Google search have failed to raise it. If it has been done would some kind soul please post a link?

I am intrigued by the FE 55/1.8 but assume that it will suffer from focus shift, as do all fast lenses. Clearly, if focusing manually, this will not be an issue since, with LV / EVF Setting Effect set to On, you will focus at the set aperture. However, when using AF, does focusing take place at the widest aperture or at the actual aperture with the Setting Effect On in the EVF? If it is the former I imagine there will be a focus shift as the lens stops down when the shutter is actuated....Show more →

You can configure the camera either way. If "Live View Preview" is set to "Effect ON", the camera will both preview and AF at the stopped-down aperture. If set to "Effect OFF" it will preview and AF wide-open.

akuba wrote:
I just had a look and found that the smallest RAW I've produced is 36,667,392 bytes and my largest is 37,617,664. Since the raw pixel data is 36,152,320 bytes this means the additional data has been between about 0.5 and 1.5 megabytes. This is certainly way more than would be required even for copious metadata (for scale: War & Peace in plain text is about 3MB ), so there is something more interesting than shooting parameters being stored there. The variation also seems detail-dependent as my smallest RAWs were from expodisc testing for magenta rings with the FE35 and the next smallest after those was an image that was 90% bokeh while the largest was a frame almost entirely of in-focus foliage.

My initial suspicion on this additional data was that these are embedded thumbnails for quicker display in the camera. I've found that magnifying in image review is comically slow while simply flipping through images scaled to the screen is not, which would match the thumbnail theory. It could also be that this additional data is for the various image enhancements but I'm still skeptical of this possibility due to the small size of the additional data. It's certainly not impossible, but I can't imagine what useful side-data the BIONZ X could be producing that stores in less than half a bit per pixel. I could have missed it, but I also can't find a setting to toggle the detail/diffraction features nor any mention of them in the manual which leads me to believe that these are always-on features. Of course even if these are always-on it could still be the case that they simply don't apply to RAW....Show more →

Perhaps the easiest way to test if detail/diffraction features are added to the ARW file is to shoot at f/16 or f/22 and compare them in IDC and LR.

James Burden wrote:
Am I missing something here....I have a metabones adapter (nex to nikon f/g) and can't get any focus magnification to work. I keep getting an error screen about not having a lens mounted......

Set "Release w/o Lens" to enable in setup menu #3 under the gear icon.

snapsy wrote:
You can configure the camera either way. If "Live View Preview" is set to "Effect ON", the camera will both preview and AF at the stopped-down aperture. If set to "Effect OFF" it will preview and AF wide-open.

Is this the same in lowlight? That's how it works with my NEX cameras, until you get in lowlight, and then it switches to AF'ing wide open. My RX1 does the opposite. It seems to AF at shooting aperture in all light, whether I'm set to Live View preview OFF or ON.

snapsy wrote:
Set "Release w/o Lens" to enable in setup menu #3 under the gear icon.

I had that set correctly. What I'm doing now is to set C3 to focus magnifier, push that then hit the OK button once for 7x mag or twice for 14x mag. Don't even touch the shutter button before you're set or it will go back to zoom out. Is this what everybody else is doing more or less?